Yeah, October is far, far away, but extreme times call for extreme measures, and even more extreme unaccounted issues call for improvisation, so we’re unearth a real piece of shit game from the bargain bin dimension of the PS2, with this rewrite for Zombie Virus..
The generic title does bely a more interesting idea that the original title, The Zombie VS The Ambulance, which might give away to more expert gamers that, yes, this is more trash coming from D3 Publisher budget line of releases, the Simple 2000 Series for the PS2, developed by an obscure studio, Vingt-Et-Un Systems, that mainly did work on these budget Simple Series title…. and to my total surprise is far from defunct, as in the last decade has worked for Capcom titles such as the RE 3 Remake, Ghost N Goblins Resurrection, and the Capcom Arcade Stadium collections.
Not to be confused with another budget title from the very same collection/line, Zombie Attack, which is an action game by Tamsoft, so eventually i’ll have to feature it here in some way.
This one is about the age old tale of zombies and their natural enemy, a sentient ambulance, or so i would say, but the game actually has a plot, because there has to be, not that it amounts to much and it’s hard to care about it since it’s a budget release through and through, with dialogues after important story beats but no voice acting, and most of the story told by silent walls of text.
Again, the usual fare for a budget release of this era sporting the various labels D3 published these things outside of Japan (as in, mostly in European territories), pretty much to be expected.
In short, everything was fine and dandy in the utopia known as Sunlight City, until an eartquake happened, literal dark clouds start spreading about, and presto, not even 1 minute into the intro cutscene and a good 90 % of people turned into zombies.
As two young medical students, you try to save the situation by finding all the survivors remaining in order to escape the city, but zombies and zombie monsters get in the way. To no one’s surprise, it was a virus, the zombi epidemic spread because someone tainted the water supply, and a worm is involved. Whatever, the rest isn’t important discussing, aside from the brass balls (or the delusional bravado, you decide which is it) of sequelbaiting. Ppph.
In terms of what actually entails as a videogame you play with your appendages, it’s basically Crazy Taxi but done on a shoestring budget with zombies thrown in, which sounds stupid but also kinda fun, on top of being shameless since there’s a directional green arrow indicating where the next survivor/s is/are, and the survivors have a “ring range” to pick them up, exactly like in Hitmaker/Sega beloved arcade classic.
A shittier version of Crazy Taxi with zombies, with worse draw distance, and even more arcade style vehicle physics, and sometimes stiff but honestly workable, serviceable controls, at the end of the day (aside from going in reverse, that is just utter ass), yes, but to an extent it is kinda fun, though “obviously” there’s more to that, as the taxi has a durability and that is consumed by just using the ambulance, oddly not so much by running over the zombie hordes, i guess concrete damages the vehicle a lot more than zombie flesh, and the game kinda has to encourage you to mow down the living impaired, since they’re just kinda there and don’t actively search for you, mostly.
You also gotta drive fast back to the hospital, because each rescued passenger has a timer, if it goes off they’ll turn into zombies and destroy the ambulance from inside, forcing you to ironically damage the vehicle by running into a wall to shake them off.
This and the car durability can be fixed by going back to the hospital, but also via some pick up items found in the city, though it just delays the inevitable because there’s also a morale system in place for the people left to defend the hospital from the zombies while you’re out and about, so also keep watch of that because when the morale/hospital HP drops to zero it’s game over.
You boost the morale/hospital health icon by bringing back survivors, with various types of survivors restoring less or more morale and the aforementioned “zombie roadkill” being encouraged by giving back some morale, might as well run the undead over since – as explained before – the durability of the ambulance decreases anyway, dropping below a certain range affects the vehicles performance and having the bar deplete entirely means game over too.
On paper it makes some sense to establish an arcade risk-reward system and motivate speeding over the undead and “Crazy Taxy-ing” the surviving humans to safety, but ultimately the morale system is what kills any chance of the experience being any better, or good in the first place.
This because morale depletes way too fast, and it’s not like durability that’s fixed entirely when returning to the hospital, as i said the main way to restore morale is bringing in new survivors, which makes some sense, as you bring more people to help defend the building, but the boost/regained morale netted by the rescued “passengers” often doesn’t even cover the morale lost by getting them to the hospital in the first place.
Again, there are some ways to boost morale, mainly vehicular zomslaughter, but it’s a band-aid and this means exploring is punished, i believe in order to obfuscate how actually small the city area you move in actually is, but regardless, it because a pretty repetive affair soon enough, to a degree that’s simply impossible to overlook since the core gameplay isn’t that great to make one overlook the insane repetition and monotonous nature of the experience, such as it becomes manifest quite early on and never foundamentally improves as the game goes on.
I honestly though i was close to finish the game… until the story starts talking about politicians, you fight a boss and then realize that this was just the end. Of Area 1. Out of 4.
And here lies the biggest sin, for me, as this game can be trashy yet somewhat fun for the first 2/3 hours…. but it reiterates itself 5 times more, and you’ll dread any of the poorly implemented scatterbrained new mechanics, twists or general attempts at providing some variation to the formula.
Sure, i’m glad boss encounters require some thought to be defeated, that after the first area morale consumption becomes less taxing, but things don’t actually change or offer proper variety, it’s the same thing over and over, plus the new requirement of finding 3 politicians that hold the keys to escape the city, defeat a boss and enter the next area/town.
Speaking of, to even make a politician NPC to spawn you gotta first save a number of survivors (which are present on a fixed number, they don’t get spawned ad libitum by the game itself like the passengers in Crazy Taxi), then you have to basically guess where the game decided to spawn it, there’s no using the usual green arrow for that one, could be in the very corner of the city map or two feet away from the very hospital he will need to enter anyway.
On the other hand, the politician NPC doesn’t disappear if you don’t save him under a certain time limit, i fully expected for this kind of game to pull such a shit trick, but nope.
Little mercies that barely matter when the game eventually expands to have cities with deserts and forests in them, but it’s mostly a bit of visual variety, gameplay is unchanged and made worse because the more you progress, the more the game will force you into longer driving sessions to get to certain areas for contrived reasons that do simply amount to good old fashioned padding.
On the brighter side of thing, you do have a garage in the hospital where you can customize and upgrade the ambulance with parts that improve the frontal flashlight coverage, the passenger slots, better wheels, bumpers, all unlocked by progressing and killing enough zombies by driving them over, so there’s this to work towards, and you can even customize the ambulance with logos and decals from other games (also released by D3 and its labels) Ving-Et-Un System worked on.
I mean, who doesn’t want to advertise Splatter Master or Yakuza’s Fury on their medical van (or on a billboard)?
Would love me a Splatter Matter poster IRL, but this will have to make do.
As mentioned before, the weird boss battles do provide momentary distraction from the mindnumbing repetitivity of the experience, yes, but eventually they resort to recyclying bosses and even having you fight some while having to contend against slipper ice patches in the boss area, as the ice makes the already not great controls unfettered undead ass to wrestle with.
I wasn’t kidding when i said this game streches on well beyond the point of it still being somewhat fun, i did expect to see the end credits roll by after 3 hours… and it should have ended there, because beating the game takes about 15 fuckin hours, and any serotonin had left my brain well long before that point, as i was hell bent on finishing it out of spite and “obligation”.
It wasn’t worth it, but if you do beat it (i don’t recommend doing so), you unlock some extra modes, proper ones, with a Score Attack misuring how many undead you can mow down, Survivor, tasking you to see how many survivors can you rescue within the time limit, and Endless, which gives you infinite time and scores you on the survivors rescued as well as the zombies killed.
Given how bored i was by just finishing the main story mode, i didn’t bother with these, at all, zilch.
Overall, Zombie Virus isn’t the worst game i’ve played, even of these budget D3 Publisher releases for the PS2, heck, by most standards of these it’s actually a lot more playable than you’d think, even if so obviously (and ferociously, one migth add) low budget, and the insane idea of pitting you as the driver of an ambulance in a zombie apocalypse with a pseudo Crazy Taxi (with a dash of Carmageddon) gameplay formula… sounds like it could make for some trashy fun time.
Shame it doesn’t know where to stop, not only in terms of strecthing out to comatose lenghts of boredom the thin premise and its gameplay loop, which might have been more fun and easier to forgive its repetitive nature if it lead more into arcade style nonsense instead of trying to pile on some mechanics that steer it more towards “realism”, even if it mostly did so in order to try and have some structure, some balance, and i most likely would have criticized if it didn’t…
One wonders what it could have been if this got more money and time to actually provide some variety to the experience, the idea is bonkers and the potential is there, but it’s clearly another budget title where they had to basically “copy and paste” a lot of it in order to meet some content quotas or (most likely) some tight deadlines.
This is one only for the REALLY dedicated trash videogame collectors that want to own them all, maybe play this one for a couple hours, stop, and move on, because it just not worth the 15 hours of boring, repetitive gameplay necessary to see the ending, as in, another silent text dump leading to a sequel bait finale, because why not, it worked so good for the live-action Mario Bros movie…
Not the worse of the bunch, especially for these budget releases of yore by D3, it’s still unique, but also pretty dang boring in the long run, and oddly not even that crap for the masochist kusoge players to get excited about.
Wise Cafe (International) 